Inclusivity Training Recap

Thank you to everyone who attended the BoCo Strong Inclusiveness Training on Friday, January 29th!

We were thrilled with the turnout and the engagement that everyone brought to the entire morning. It was certainly a lot of information to pack into a short amount of time, but everyone showed wonderful stamina and participation. We hope that everyone left with some useful tools and strategies that can be used to impact both personal and professional work.

I received some questions on the feedback forms about how inclusivity relates to resilience, so I just wanted to briefly follow up on that topic. As Ms. Suarez mentioned during the training, inclusivity has become a buzzword in corporate settings. Not only does it indicate important values for the internal culture of an organization, but inclusivity also brings together people from different backgrounds, with diverse ways of thinking, and access to varied types of knowledge and experience. This results in more resilient business processes, as teams can work better, innovate more effectively, and create longer lasting and more impactful projects.

Inclusivity, however, reaches far beyond the business realm. It is key concept for promoting communication between communities of all shapes and sizes, bonding neighbors, bridging between organizations, and linking citizens to governments and policy decisions. Ensuring that inclusivity is at the forefront of planning improves disaster preparedness, reduces risk, and increases our individual abilities to recover from disaster when we have access to varied resources and skillsets from those around us. As we diversify our own personal networks, we are better able to learn from one another, grow, and equip ourselves with new tools that make us more resilient to all kinds of shocks and stresses. Inclusivity can be a catalyst for collaborative action, motivation for innovative changes, and a driver of transformative change. It may not always obvious how it relates to resilience, but the benefits of it thread through all of our systems, tie us closer together, and increase our collective capacity.

Though inclusivity is not an easy process, the good news is that there are already many people in our communities who do this naturally. Sometimes called cultural brokers, these individuals bridge across different types of communities and increase communication, resource sharing and access. Identifying these cultural brokers can be a great start for building out your own methods and practice of inclusivity. We’ll be working to highlight the work of some of these individuals on our website. If you know of one, send them our way.

Moving forward, I’ll certainly be working on my own definition of inclusivity, and I’d love to hear about yours! Please stay in touch and I look forward to seeing you at our next BoCo Strong event: check out our meetup page and website calendar for upcoming gatherings.